


Aftermath of a Storm

by waterloosunset123



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, He missed her so much it's ridiculous., Memories, Romance, TARDIS rooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:46:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2544752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterloosunset123/pseuds/waterloosunset123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight Earth days after losing her, perhaps out of a misguided need for the sleep and food he's denied himself since Canary Wharf, he stays inside the TARDIS long enough to deal with his grief. Or at least face it. Don't worry: I, as a rule, cannot resist a happy ending. AND, it's completely canonical.<br/>28-February-2015. I've added some bits and made a few rewrites, and now, it's complete. Final edits, I promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aftermath of a Storm

**Author's Note:**

> Set between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones." Third person, present tense, POV The Doctor (obviously).

To look at her jacket, to feel its fabric with the tips of his fingers, is utter torture.

Ripped at the bottom, its zip blasted away, the right cuff of Rose’s jacket had been the only victim of their quest to escape through the sewers on a rescue mission in Gramasilia. Their pursuers were Nyklen slave owners, looking to recover the millions of microscopic eggs that would, in the future, be their next generation of factory workers. When the final tunnel had started to close automatically, Rose had turned abruptly, in order to toss over the bags containing the eggs to him with her left arm, and, as he caught it, her right forearm had got trapped by the bars of the door for a second, before The Doctor sonicked it open and tightly closed again. She ran after him, her jacket more or less intact from the sonic zap.

Donna points the jacket out, of course. He instantly feels like launching it straight into a black hole. He doesn’t. He hangs it on the back of his wardrobe, and hides it beneath an old coat of his so he doesn’t go near it.

That is just the beginning.

There is ice up and down his spine when he finds a book— an old favourite of his, a novel based on the struggles of the first and second generation of human colonists on Andromeda— still laying on her ( _their_ ) usual couch in the library. To see the bookmark on page 489, knowing that the book has only thirty pages more—it nearly makes him want to rip it to shreds so he doesn’t have to face the fact she’d never finish it, so he doesn’t see his neat High Gallifreyan script on the sticky notes that mark different places…

_“Is that Gallifreyan, too?”_

_"Yes," he answered. "High Gallifreyan.”_

_“In the console room, you also have these sticky notes. How can it be so different?”_

_"Because_ that’s _Circular Gallifreyan. It was like... a different dialect. Well, no. Not a different dialect-- forget I said that. But you get the point, right? Same language, different structure.”_

_"Yeah.” She paused, and he noticed the sudden gleam in her eyes. “Can you read it aloud?”_

_"It doesn’t translate, Rose. It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”_

_“I know,” she began, nervously._

_"But?"_

_“I kinda ... I want to know what it sounds like. If. If you wanna show me, that is.”_

_He obliged._

She had said, with the tone of someone not finding the proper words for all they wanted to express, that it was the most beautiful language she’d ever heard. He wonders now if she knew how much that meant to him, how miraculous he thought it, that she found some wonder where he thought there was nothing but an ache he'd always have. A pain that would never lessen.

He flips through the pages fast, then slow, not knowing what to do with his hands, because he swears, if he concentrates, he can hear her voice reading the adventures of the colonists in his head. It's a masochistic act his brain seems only too keen on initiating on its own. Inevitably, he knows, there will probably come a day when he won't be able to remember it. Not exactly. Oh, he'll remember _her,_ most assuredly forever. But the details will fade. The colour of her eyes, the exact shape of her lips, the texture of her hair through his fingers. Her hand in his.

He comes to page 489 again, and has the strangest urge to try, at the top of his lungs, to shout the ending of the book to her over distances untold. To tell her, Rose, yes, after all they’d been through, the people _do_  make it out alive. Their tiny ship survives ( _you wouldn’t believe how they manage it!_ ), and the colony flourishes. Life, as always, finds a way. Instead, he places the book on the appropriate shelf, and walks away, leaving in her bookmark.

He finally feels the need for food, approximately eight Earth days after the Battle of Canary Wharf. Eight days he’s spent mostly outside his ship. He feels annoyed at how eight Earth days are usually a breeze for him-- he laughs at how short a time that is, in fact-- but now the hours arrive and  _never, ever go faster._

* * *

When he steps inside right after Christmas with Donna, he can manage staying only for as long as it takes him to set new coordinates and, for the sake of speed, break _every_ rule of time-capsule piloting they ever taught him at the Academy. Because, for a while, standing in the console room only reminds him of the second the projection cut out.

Of what she said, tears down her cheeks. Of what he could have.

He reflects on the fact that he'd almost told her. He'd almost told her many, many times, actually, had burned to say it, and then hadn't followed through. She had to know, he thinks. Had to. You don't change somebody's outlook, and watch them grab on to life with new impetus because of you, and not _notice_  how desperately they needed that. Needed you. You don't make them remember things they'd had hidden away, like compassion and kindness, and not _see_ it. How absolutely in love they are. He feels cowardly. It's not how he would have wanted to say it, never the ideal time nor place, but _Rose Tyler, I love you_ is a short enough sentiment to profess on a beach. Still. It would have told her everything and nothing, because words are stupid that way and, undoubtedly, so is he.

He has not often wanted to run quite this much.  Of course, he doesn't care to wait for the waters to calm on most days, but now... Now running away feels a lot like self-preservation.

In those eight days, he saves hundreds of thousands from a nuclear meltdown in China, 2157, and rescues the few small children stranded on a space station about to blow up near the Loxham cluster. He stops a Zygon invasion in Medieval India and shakes the hand of the king of the Rassunians after saving his little boy from being mauled to death by giant vampires. He doesn’t stop at all, anymore, not even to catch his breath. Running is his job description but right now it might as well be his only sanity. His lifestyle and his avoidant redemption.

He visits fifteen of the some-odd-hundred wonders of the Universe, just for something to make his feet move, for something to finally raise his spirits, hating that this backfires horribly and instead makes him mentally run through the pitifully short list of the wonders Rose got to see. Running is, he reminds himself, a tool that sometimes doesn't work. Not when she's always on his mind.

He dismantles and fixes a power generator for a village of desperate people on a planet that no one remembers but him. As he sonics the parts together, the smell of the metal seems to spur him on, to obsess during the mindless task about trying to find a loophole in the physics and mathematics of the Universes big enough for Rose to fit through. He repairs and rejuvenates the massive generator in six hours flat and gives them power to run their society and stay alive, knowing that he could (and would) do that again and again for thousands of species in his hundreds of years. He could (and would) topple dictators just with his words, defeat hundreds of monsters, protect millions of creatures, and save whole planets with nothing but his wit and his sonic. He could give her all of time and space and burn up a sun just to tell her goodbye. But bringing her back, he knows, is a horrible impossibility.

Of course, he realises the glaring wrong of seeing the console room for once in his life as simple means of transport from Point A to Point B in time and space, of detaching and running on auto-pilot without really noticing anything in his path, but, also a first, he doesn’t know how to fix it (and he's not sure he wants to, because _she, she_ deserves... everything, his grief included). He drifts on in emptiness, hurting because he can't stop, and hurting more to think of the possibility of giving it all up for a little while. Just to rest. He's so tired.

* * *

He goes to the galley. Her mug. A glass of water she didn’t finish. Some other little details of her presence (her absence) he doesn’t care to register let alone consider. The liquor cabinet has the hypervodka Jack had bought and invited him so many times to drink. He’d never felt the slightest impulse before, but now the misguided respite of an alcoholic haze doesn't sound bad. Has a strange sort of appeal, even. It's possibly the most ludicrous - and when he stops to think about it, downright _human_ - thought he's had so far, of course. For one thing, his hepatocytes would metabolise the alcohol so quickly and effectively, it would take massive quantities even to produce so much as a buzz. For another, the memories would come back intact. Every one of them. They always do, barring some temporary episodes of amnesia, like the one in San Francisco, 1999. He eats something and sips a cup of Earl Grey (her favourite) before he gets sick of it. He exits the galley.

The TARDIS doesn’t help. Rose’s room is now - and this doesn’t surprise him at all - next door to the galley. It is open; the fuchsia of her duvet and the ebony of the night table are broadly visible. It's immediately obvious how she'd had trouble choosing clothes the morning they went to Jackie's. Jeans and hoodies and jumpers all over the bed. Silly reindeer-covered Christmas jumper included. His back hits the corridor wall, and he wilts to the ground, the only sound his shallow, conscious breathing. He hasn’t broken down since the War. And he won’t. Instead, he hugs his knees, and shuts down, completely. Just breathing. It's so silent. Out here, in there. This ship, his home, is so unbearably, terrifyingly huge all of a sudden. But he stays. He spends an indeterminate amount of time just staring at the silver of the door, frozen, refusing to give in to his stormy thoughts or his ship’s not-so-subtle push to let it all out.

He finally stands up when he starts falling asleep. His legs carry him to his bedroom, instead of the console room, for once. He collapses on the bed, more consumed by weariness than he’s felt in a long time, eyes moving between the ceiling and the old Gallifreyan poem Susan painted on his wall centuries ago. He reads the first stanza and then the most constant of truths in his life finally comes to mind: _Everyone’s gone, in the end. Everyone_. He doesn't notice he’s weeping in earnest when he falls asleep.

* * *

  _He awakens with a deep inhalation and a rather persistent tremor in his hands, a cold, wet sensation skating haphazardly down his spine. The first thing he sees are curtains. Blinds, actually. He remembers having neither blinds nor curtains in his room. That's weird. They’re blue on the inside, silver on the outside and they make a soft rattling noise as the warm morning air gently balloons them in like a bellows and snaps them back out. The window is at least half opened (he can't think of the reason why). He closes his eyes._

_He turns, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, and a voice is heard, softly.  
_

_He must have the most idiotic, most masochistic subconscious in the Universe right now, because that voice. Oh, that voice._

_“Rose?”_

_He opens his eyes and sees her. He doesn't want to -- doesn’t want to see the product of his grieving mind, this hallucinatory apparition of blonde hair and sleepy hazel eyes in front of him. (_ For goodness' sake, doesn't his subconscious  _know_ that she's alive and well, just not in this Universe? _) So he closes his eyes, and opens them again. Same result. Tries one more time. Doesn’t at all change the evidence before him. It’s cruel._

_His larynx doesn’t seem to work. If it did, though, he wouldn't know what else to say. He's having a hard enough time drawing breath as it is.  
_

_“What’s wrong, Doctor?” she repeats. She rests her head on her left hand, and uses her right to reach for his fingers and intertwine them with hers. The tactile input is eerily perfect – from the texture of her fingertips down to the temperature of her palm. If he wasn’t lying down already—_ next to her, _he acknowledges—he’d faint from the way his circulatory system feels far too inadequate to deal with this. With the way she’s caressing the dorsum of his hand with her thumb even though she’s in another Universe._

_That’s when he notices the bed feels different. It’s warmer by a couple of degrees and softer than either of their beds in the TARDIS and king size and there is a royal blue duvet covering them both. Everything feels different, he realises. Even his heartsbeat feels unfamiliar, like his body rejects one beat and embraces the next._

_He looks at her, dumbfounded, then turns back to the half-opened blinds. He watches a zeppelin fly past the window in the distance._

_A zeppelin? On twenty-first-century Earth? He runs through his knowledge of the history of the human race and comes to the only conclusion, improbable as it is._

_In that moment, he finds he suddenly_ knows _this reality. Because he’s_ lived _it. The one with a parallel Earth and consulting for Torchwood until the TARDIS is ready and dinner at Jackie’s once a week and playing with Tony in his spare time. He feels now, his single heart, and sees his second in front of him, looking concerned._

_He breathes deep and laughs with relief and self-deprecation._

_She squeezes his hand. "Doctor..."_

_“Sorry,” he begins, borderline giddy. “I'm okay, really. Come here.” He hugs her tightly, kissing her hair repeatedly, just because he can. If they were upright, he’d be spinning her around like a madman, too. He lets her go, keeping his arm around her waist, and his leg tangled with hers._

_She giggles."What's all this about, then? Not that I mind, but..." He stays silent. "Doctor?"  
_

_"You mean 'cause--"_

_"Your theatrics, yes."_

_"Drama king, remember?" he tells her, dropping a kiss to her nose.  
_

_"Oh, come on." Underneath the disbelief, she makes_ that  _sound the slightest bit flirty, in that unique way she has, and it takes him a second to realise that she's staring at his lips. He stares at hers right back._

_"I'll tell you later," he promises. And he kisses her, still unbelieving, after all this time (six years, five months and nine days), of the life he's leading now._

_For the first time in hours, and though it’s a gross understatement, he really is all right._

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously, the last part is set after "Journey's End." Please don't hate me for the "it was all a dream" trope.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
